Russell Westbrook, You So Crazy!

Russell Westbrook ain’t right. Actually, he never really is—the Thunder’s third-year point guard isn’t exactly known for his equilibrium. Unpredictable, even erratic, Westbrook is a zero-sum hellion who this year somehow always came out on top. Entrusted with the offense, he blurred chaos and creativity, passion and outright hostility, and yes, genius and madness. If Derrick Rose was all jet propulsion and aerodynamic glide, Westbrook was his unhinged, angular counterpoint. I’ll say it again: If Rose is money in the bank, Westbrook is like shooting craps in an abandoned missile silo.

In these playoffs, though, this style has caught up with him, or at least the public has bothered to notice its dark side. He’s been lambasted for shooting too much and discouraging ball movement; when an unusually acrid Durant closed out the Nuggets, it was like Westbrook had been put in his place. Last night against a bigger, stronger Memphis team, he was muted, even deflated. Maybe the ultra-physical Grizzlies changed the scale of his daring; maybe his career-long buzz finally wore off. Whatever the cause, the Thunder were a more balanced—and less colorful—team. Westbrook may have still taken more shots from the floor than KD, but he didn’t monopolize the ball. As if on cue, key reserves James Harden and Eric Maynor responded with their best performances of the playoffs.

In public, I suffer from Westbrook nostalgia. He came off the bench for much of his rookie year, as the Thunder tried to figure out exactly what kind of player it had scored in the 2008 lottery. At UCLA, Westbrook had played off the ball, a defensive specialist whose YouTube-approved dunks hinted at something bigger. In embryo, he was a no-jumper guard who could get to the rim at will but had trouble converting, and at 6’3", a berserker on the glass. Maybe he didn’t quite know how to oversee a team in the half-court, but things happened when Russell Westbrook entered the game. He was a catalyst, an active, emotive player who, like the Thunder as a whole, achieved some semblance of respectability by the second half of the season. If Oklahoma City never intended to embrace strict positional roles, Westbrook’s eccentricities certainly encouraged this way of thinking, or maybe even forced the issue.

It’s the Westbrook of 2009-10 that I pine for, and sanctimoniously reference whenever this year’s incarnation coughs up the ball or attempts the basketball equivalent of teleporting through a solid brick wall. In my memory, that Westbrook was more mischief-maker than rupturer. His misjudgments with weird and endearing; they enhanced him, no different from those moments Westbrook insisted on skying for the rebound when he probably should have hung back, waiting to reset the offense or key the fast break. Certainly, this Westbrook wasn’t thinking of himself over others, or perverting the game for his own benefits. He was just a different kind of player, and his originality had consequences.

If Durant was cool and steady, the over-eager Westbrook was the opposite. What’s more, this energy was, more often than not, something his teammates fed off of, even if he was still finding his way as a floor general. Maybe he would never be a master strategist; Westbrook could still, in his own way, animate the entire team with the ball in his hands. This is very much something you would say about Derrick Rose, yesterday voted the league’s MVP. But the Westbrook of 2010-11 sucked the vitality right out of Thunder, hogging it all for himself. Rose came under fire from stats-minded fellows, many of whom trumpeted Dwight Howard’s MVP candidacy. Somehow, Westbrook was spared—until now. Until this postseason. Then, normal set in, and one by one, we shook off our trance and let sense most ordinary set in.

Based on Tuesday, maybe someone finally got in his ear about his high-wire act, which was lovely for the regular season, but simply inappropriate for the playoffs. Worth noting: when OKC essentially put itself on the map against the Lakers last spring, it was Westbrook who raised the meme most high. There was a monster inside, it got out, and things were never the same.

Then again, I sometimes ask myself if the 2009-10 Westbrook, more a rhetorical touchstone than anything else, is merely a figment of my imagination. Was that him last night? If so, I don’t think I want him back, no matter how much agony it may cause me or the Thunder.

My most vivid memories are of that rookie season, when Westbrook had so little control over himself or the game, when he seemed convinced that logic was not an essential ingredient world domination. What we saw this season was a player who, in effect, learned his lessons from composure only to cast it aside. Inverting everything we think we know about how players grow, he started wild, paid his dues, and then came out on the other side less repentant than ever, but with mystique and an innate sense of how to trick himself, and others, into believing that he was still on the path to self-improvement.

That wasn’t Westbrook yesterday, at least not any of the ones I know. There was no glint in his eye, no ear-to-ear, dine-on-guts grin. His crossover was deliberate, heavy; the announcers calls it "hard" but it felt like a "smart basketball play", not an impulse. In the fourth quarter, he snatched a steal out of mid-air, took off at something like full-speed, and then clanged the dunk into the stands. He didn’t even seem that upset.

Westbrook may have gone too far, but that doesn’t mean he has to come back to Earth. It’s not clear he ever lived here. Even if I want to think there was once a perfect hybrid of Westbrook’s good and bad, or wacky and sentient, there probably never was. That’s what makes him who he is, for better or worse, and it’s what keeps us from having to brand him Stephon Marbury Redux. As with all things Thunder, though, it also demands that someone with a brain get in there and tinker in ways we haven’t yet imagined or expected. In the end, Westbrook can’t save himself, or us from him, or him from us. That’s what teammates, and coaching staffs, are for. What remains to be seen is whether, for these playoffs, the call is too little, too late.

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